Today we are pleased to announce a new version of Phaser Editor. This new version 4.10.0 includes improvements to the prefab system, which allow for more flexibility in creating more complex prefabs. We have also made some adjustments to Spine animations and fixed some bugs.
Spine assets preview
In Phaser Editor we try to provide visual feedback on all assets in as much detail as possible. Spine animations are no exception. In this release we have added the ability to choose the Spine texture atlas. Previously we used a filename-based approach, but this was not sufficient for some cases where users prefer to package images from multiple animations into one atlas. Now, this is fully configurable in the Asset Pack Editor:
The Preview Atlas Key property allows you to type the key of the texture atlas you want to use to preview the Spine animation. You can also click the button on the right to select a list of all texture atlases available in the project.
In-scene Spine animation preview
A while ago we introduced in Phaser Editor the preview of different types of animations directly in the scene. That is the case of Sprite animations and Particle Emitter animations. In this new version we have implemented the preview of Spine animations in the scene. This allows you to see how the Spine animation will look in real time, while you edit it.
For this, we have a new Inspector view section called Spine Preview:
To enable animation preview in the scene, you need to select the Run Preview Animation parameter and select the animation in Preview Animation:
In addition to playing an animation in the scene, you can also choose to show an animation but frozen at a specific time. To do this, you need to change the time value -expressed in milliseconds- in the Preview Time (ms) parameter:
Spine and Box2D nested prefabs
Both Spine and Box2D objects have something in common: they require certain data at the time of their creation and this data cannot be changed throughout the life of the object.
In the case of Spine, this data is the key to access the texture atlas and the skeleton data. In the case of Box2D this is even more visible, since the objects receive all the configuration through the constructor and then it would be very expensive to change many of their parameters.
Both Spine and Box2D are third-party libraries and do not follow the Phaser API style. Therefore, before this version of the editor, it was not possible to modify some data of the nested prefabs of a Spine or Box2D object.
This is now possible as of this version of the editor. You can now modify any data of a nested prefab of any of these objects. To do this we have introduced a new method of initializing nested prefabs that requires a configuration object that is passed to the constructor of the root prefab and it is propagated by all nested prefabs at all levels. We call this configuration object with the name xargs, and it will appear in the code generation of a prefab only if it contains nested Spine or Box2D prefabs.
You can learn more about xargs in the editor documentation.
More customization for the User Component code generation
Code generation in the editor is flexible and allows you to mix both code generated by the editor's compiler and code written by the user. The editor generates the code related to the creation of game objects and their properties. And the user writes the code for the game logic. However, each user or project has its own specificities, and sometimes the editor's code generation is not sufficient or cannot be customized in some aspects.
This is the case of user component inheritance. If you want to create a base user component for all your components, or for some of them, accessing the gameObject field from the base component can be cumbersome. To solve this, we have added a new parameter in the user component code generation that allows you to include or exclude the generation of the this.gameObject field, so it would be up to the user to define it if needed either in the user component or in a base class.
By default, the Game Object Field parameter is enabled, but you could disable it to exclude generation of the this.gameObject field:
Other changes
We fixed a bug about the code generation of the blendMode property for container, layer, and spine objects.
All current subscribers of Phaser Editor can download this update immediately from their User Account.
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